A new pterosaur website on the way!

This is just a little teaser post for the near future. One unintentional, but perhaps inevitable, recurring theme here has been my ‘why aren’t pterosaurs given the same treatment as dinosaurs’ posts. Of course I understand that dinosaurs are bigger, better known, the subject of far more research, are known from far more fossils and with far more species etc. I am not a fool in imagining that the average journalist or 10-year-old should give equal space to pterosaurs and dinosaurs, but when looking at the former, but I can’t understand why they are perceived in such a different manner to their terrestrial brothers.

One noticeable aspect is the amount of web space devoted to pterosaurs. With a couple of notable (but hardly mainstream) exceptions, the pterosaurs barely exist on the net, except when appended to a dinosaur site. There are hundreds of dinosaur sites (and various blogs, Facebook groups, dedicated chat-rooms etc.) many of high quality, yet the pterosaurs are once again left out in the cold – until now!

Yes a group of us have got together (including yours truly) to correct this travesty with a brand new and spanking pterosaur website written by a big gang of ptero experts (and me). We have Dr’s Dave Hone (me), Darren Naish and Lorna Steel with further contributions from PhD students Ross Elgin, Mark Witton and Mike Habib. To top it off and make sure it looks all sparkly and nice Mark is contributing his artwork as are palaeoart mainstays John Conway and the fantastic Luis Rey! In addition of course to lots of photos of pterosaurs that have been offered up by various collections and researchers. The pterosaur legend that is Professor ‘Dino’ Frey has also pitched in with some information on German and South America species for us.

Of course I’ll put up more when the site is formally launched, but hopefully this will whet a few appetites for now. Basically we want to ensure that there is a single great site up and running providing up-to-date info on pterosaurs and their history as written by experts in the respective fields. Hopefully we can shake loose a few of those misconceptions that keep creeping out. You know, the ones I complain about every single week…..

Sadly not, that would be a huge undertaking and obviously all of us are deeply involved in our own research. Jeremy Rayner some years ago produced a list of all known pterosaur papers (it might still be online somwhere) to about 1995 and that ran to 40 odd single spaced pages, and the research in pterosaurs has massively accelerated since then. A database would be a fantastic thing, but we would need a more organised group to start collecting them and some money to do the work and support the project. It’s a nice idea for the future though…